So Danny, then, has gone, and it's as much as I can do to write about it in even a cursory fashion.
The overly-sized, overly-loved cat whose every move I have watched (or demanded reports of) for the last 14 years, was put to sleep on Wednesday at 10am.
Mobility had become a struggle (not impossible, but more difficult) and a long-standing ear infection was causing problems too.
Prescription after prescription did little to solve either complaint, and on Wednesday, it was again an exertion to get into the kitchen for breakfast. After breakfast, I noticed that the troublesome ear was bleeding; and my mother (with whom he lived) and I decided that enough was enough.
I'd imagined it was going to happen on Tuesday, but it was postponed in the hope that the latest anti-inflammatories would fix the limping which had troubled him for the last couple of weeks. That wasn't the case, though. Both Monday and Tuesday nights - when I was supposed to be sleeping - I was trying to work out the probability of either the ear or the limping being resolved satisfactorily and in the long-term, and couldn't help but feel utterly pessimistic.
The love which wants to end suffering is perhaps even more important than romantic love - the difficult, decisive move to deliver permanent darkness (from Danny's perspective) and a heaviness which will lift in time, but the imprint left by the weight will remain in perpetuity (from the perspective of everyone who knew Danny.)
In the early hours of Tuesday, I said a prolonged farewell, resting my head on his back, one of my hands stroking his fur, and wishing him well on the journey he was about to undertake. I explained that he had always been given the best possible life, and it was now our duty to give him the best possible death. In the middle of this sermon, he spun around and tried to bite the hand which was in contact with him. Even in the last 36 hours of his life, he still didn't care too much for his excessively-sentimental co-owner.
You will be well-remembered, Danny: the recalcitrant barrier sitting in the middle of a roll of wrapping paper at 2am on Christmas Day as I was trying to parcel up my last-minute gift ideas. It was quite deliberate; you stepping out of the cardboard box in which you'd been sleeping in order to sabotage my best efforts.
Inevitably, we'd end up with a ticker-tape of paper all over my mother's living room, with any number of shiny, spherical decorations miraculously 'fallen' from the tree and thrown across the floor, catching the light with you in skittish pursuit.
You, the catapult which would invade my room at 5:20am, and crash into the middle of my 'sleeping' body. I was wide awake, because the creaking of the door had given you away long ago, and was waiting for the impact to arrive. I'd still pretend to be asleep, though, until your head was so close to mine that your whiskers were tickling my face; then I'd exclaim: what the hell's going on here! and you'd purr ecstatically as my arms closed around you.
Even you, though, were subject to the brutal law of impermanence which brings low everything in the end. At least I take solace in the fact that human intervention saved you from the further ravages of age (for you were 98 in human years) and this relinquishing of your vessel at the 'right' time is the greatest symbol of how much you are loved.
